The ability to manage casino chips has become increasingly more important to reduce fraud and to obtain insight about the activity of a casino chip as it makes its way through a casino environment or, if allowed, its use in non-casino environments. Currently, casino operators rely on unique logos, colors, print, numbers, or a combination thereof to identify the source and/or origin of a casino chip and, if sophisticated enough, a very general understanding of how a casino chip migrates across a casino environment and/or non-casino environment. For example, a casino can deploy various number encoded casino chips which can be directed for use in selected casino and/or non-casino areas. For example, a first set of casino chips might have a first number sequence which indicates that these casino chips should be deployed for use in the poker tables, a second number sequence which indicates that the casino chips should be deployed for use in craps gaming tables. A casino operator can then examine the collection boxes from each of the various casino sectors to see if casino chips have migrated between sections. That is, in general terms, how many casino chips deployed for the poker tables ended up in blackjack table collection boxes. Armed with this information, general assumptions can be derived about the activity of a gamer in a casino.
Casino operators have also made extensive use of bar-coded vouchers, which operate as a substitute for cash at automated gaming machines (such as slot and video poker machines) and can be exchanged for chips at a gaming table. Vouchers provide a number of benefits over cash or conventional gaming chips because the bar-code is machine readable. Vouchers suffer, however, from a number of drawbacks. Because vouchers are made of paper, they are not durable and can be rendered unreadable if crumpled, torn or stained. For this reason, vouchers are generally used only once. In addition, the bar-code on a voucher is capable of holding very little information and is relatively easy to duplicate. As an improvement to conventional chips and paper vouchers, recent practices employ casino smart chips which include electronic transceivers (e.g., RFID transceivers) which have allowed casino operators to better manage and track casino chips in both casino and non-casino environments. However, existing casino smart chips are currently deployed and focused on providing secure monetization of the chip. Specifically, currently deployed casino smart chips are provided to ensure that that the chip is not fraudulent when a casino cashes out to the player holding the chip. Current practices, however, fall short to provide comprehensive systems and methods that allow for the tracking, management, reporting, provisioning, activation, commissioning, and decommissioning of casino smart chips under a central casino smart chip management platform. Additionally, current practices fall short to provide capabilities to collect and process casino smart chips to generate demographic data for use in identifying popular casino and non-casino product/service offerings. Further, current practices fall short to provide capabilities to identify geographic location of a casino smart chip within a casino environment (i.e., whether the casino chip has left a casino environment).
From the foregoing, it is appreciated that there exists a need for systems and methods that ameliorate the shortcomings of existing practices.